The real enemy in the world is ourselves.

Abductions, torture, assassinations, terrorism and other horrors against individuals, but also against whole groups of people and cities through bombings and other weaponry (think of Fallujah for example) are more than ample evidence of an administration gone over to "the dark side". While covert activities already named, and more, have been part and parcel of the U.S. foreign policy for more than 50 years, with the atrocities in Afghanistan and Iraq they have achieved new levels of violence and numbers.

Some, perhaps many, people in the world are quite aware of this. Those in affected countries are more than aware, if they've survived. The people least aware of what the U.S., British and Australian countries are doing are the American people themselves, and this is due largely to complicit corporate control of mainstream news in the U.S.

But even in Europe, I think most people are not aware of the extent of their own governments' quiet complicity in all of this; in the very least, looking the other way; and more likely, quietly cooperating in the economic venture of pillaging and raping of oil and other resource rich and strategicly placed countries. It is nothing more than violent colonialism updated with the weapons of today and a refined resolve, and often by proxy.

What the U.S. with its sidekicks is doing cannot happen in a vacuum. Others in the know are also complicit, and this raises some huge questions about western 'civilization', driven as it is through its economic policies of the capitalism of today. And the People of the world are paying the price for this raping of our earth and its people. I won't even bring up 'values'.

I can only hope that more people become knowledgeable of what is really going on, for a knowledgeable People is the best antidote to this unspeakable criminality. It's time the People realize that the greatest criminals of all time occupy some of the highest positions in the "developed" countries of today.

Torture has been in the news quite a bit lately. Many (perhaps most) Americans first heard that U.S. soldiers tortured prisoners when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke (in April 2004). Of course, U.S. operatives have been torturing prisoners for decades. There's even a course in it, which is taught at the US Army School of Americas (now renamed the "Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation") in Fort Benning, GA. In late 2005 another scandal emerged, this one to do with the CIA's secret prisons in Europe and elsewhere, and the CIA's practice of "rendition", which means abducting people and flying them to countries where they can be interrogated without having to worry about whether any US law is being broken. Just one example of this is the case of Abu Omar, who was picked up off the street in Milan and flown (via Germany) to Egypt, where he was held for fourteen months and tortured (see Italy Charges CIA Agents).

When Condoleezza Rice visited Germany in early December 2005 she faced a barrage of questions concerning the CIA's practice of rendition and whether there were CIA-run secret prisons in Europe (she did not deny that there were). The publicity prompted a poll by Associated Press / Ipsos which found that "In America, 61 percent of those surveyed agreed torture is justified at least on rare occasions." (UK Guardian) (One has to wonder how they framed the question, since there's a big difference between "justified" and "justified on rare occasions".) Hardly any Americans, however, are aware that not only do U.S. operatives occasionally torture "terrorist suspects" but that in many cases they torture them to death. The failure of the U.S. media to make any mention of this is the subject of an article by Peter Phillips, Hard Evidence of US Torturing Prisoners to Death Ignored by Corporate Media.

Phillips refers to a report by the ACLU which quotes forty-four US military autopsy reports. Phillips asks: "How can the American public understand the gravity of the torture that is currently being committed in our name when the issue is being reported with no reference to the extent to which these crimes against humanity have gone?"

As a contribution to informing the American public as to what torture really means, we reproduce here a few of the autopsy reports. Remember that these deaths resulting from torture were produced by U.S. operatives, acting under the orders of commanding officers, who were implementing a policy which has its origins at the highest levels within the U.S. Department of Defense. These autopsy reports are not for people just brought in dead from the street — they are for people who died while in U.S. custody.

Read on....